Written and presented by leading British writer Howard Jacobson, this program examines the story of the origins, and consequences, of Christian belief. The bare facts are that although Christianity originated in devout Judaism, for Jews, it has by and large been a calamity. The roots of anti-semitism that enabled the Holocaust lie in 2000 years of Christian vilification of the Jews based on the false accounts of Jesus's death written in the Christian...

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, battle lines are drawn between conservative clerics claiming a God-given right to rule and reformers challenging their authority. This provocative program seeks to understand what happens when a modern state is re-created based on fundamentalist Islamic principles, and whether its society should be open and democratic or oppressed and authoritarian. From Iran's chaotic capital Tehran to its holy city of Qom, Iranians...

A history of the Catholic Church in the modern era presents the story of the centuries-long conflict between "progress" and "tradition" in the Church and traces its complex role in modern history. "A magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between "progress" and "tradition" in the world's largest international institution. The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than...

"From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture wars Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control--sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a...

From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos

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Just seven months after Pope Pius XII assumed the papacy in 1939, war broke out in Europe. Pius attempted to dissuade Italian leader Benito Mussolini from entering World War II, but he was unsuccessful. Throughout the war, Pius maintained the Catholic Church's neutrality, though he often spoke out against the war and the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. After U.S. forces liberated Rome in June 1944, Pius delivered a speech expressing his gratitude...

Few literary works have inspired as diverse and impassioned opinions as Machiavelli's The Prince. While some have denounced it as epitomizing the immorality and cynicism of despotic political rulers, others have considered it a paragon of pragmatism and lucidity in political affairs-including Napoleon Bonaparte, who deemed The Prince the only book that deserved to be read. In this program, the treatise that gave birth to modern political theory is...

This program focuses the spotlight on a region that crackles with both aboriginal and linguistic nationalism. The politics of language is at the heart of the battle for a unilingual French-speaking society; at the same time, a different yet similar battle is going on in the icy north, where the Cree people are fighting the Quebec government over territory the Cree claim-an example of an aboriginal group using the language of European nationalism to...

The history and social structures of Latin America's native peoples were neither simple nor peaceful before the arrival of Europeans. Wars were fought, empires were created and destroyed, and-as this program illustrates-narrative tapestries of fact and fiction were woven in the process. Underscoring the linguistic sophistication that flourished for thousands of years in the region, the program addresses the proliferation of Nahuatl and Quechua literature,...